On Pandora Internet Radio, you create your own “radio station” by naming a favorite song or artist. Pandora scans thousands of pieces of music that have been analyzed by something called the Music Genome Project to identify those with similar attributes to the one you named. Voilà! New music for you to enjoy.

Languages are rich in the history and taxonomy of a place, reflecting subtleties that can be lost in translation, says Greg Anderson, an ethnographer who directs Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute. When the last keepers of a language die off, so does the fluent understanding of that particular environment.